The One and Only Bottle of Wine

 

AI image by BING

Yorkshire Pudding's recent post entitled Temperance ended with a "How about you?" question. I put in a short reply there, but then also felt inspired to share a memory here on my own blog.

I was born into a teetotaller family. My maternal grandfather was chairman of a local branch of a Temperance organisation. My paternal grandmother's father was among the founders of a free church. My own parents weren't active members of any organisation or church, but there was never any alcohol in our house; nor was it ever served in any family context on either side of the family. For my own part, even in my youth I never felt tempted to start drinking alcohol either. I had enough friends with whom I had fun without any of us drinking anything stronger than tea - while on the other hand, I also came across a few  people with serious addiction problems.

The Wine Bottle story that popped to mind for me is this: 

Once, back in my teens, some time in the early 1970s, my parents had invited a business friend of my dad's + his wife for dinner; and they came bearing a gift: A bottle of wine. They probably felt some consternation when neither their bottle nor any other wine appeared on the table together with the food. But no drinks stronger than 2,25% apple cider were ever served in our house. 

However, my parents must also have felt a reluctance to just get rid of the wine later by opening the bottle and pouring it out. Instead, it was just stored away in the cellar. 

Just putting something away in the cellar and forgetting about it is of course not all that odd. (For one thing, my dad was always rather reluctant to throw anything away.) But it did feel odd when decades later, I discovered that wine bottle (still intact) sitting on a shelf in the cellar of the house they moved to some twenty years later (dad's childhood home, which they added to and moved into when he retired). They did actually get rid of quite a lot of other stuff in connection with moving... But for obscure reasons, not that bottle!

The 40+ years old bottle (still unopened) was still there in 2014 when my brother and I finally cleared out that house to sell it (after our parents had passed away). 

I too just left it on the shelf, to be dealt with (together with a lot of other odds and ends) by the antique dealer we hired for the final clearing of the house. 

For all I know, it may still be sitting unopened on a shelf in someone else's cellar.